How to Lose a County For 30 Years: A Democrat’s Guide to Rural Abandonment
Part I – Strategic Absence and Organizational Disappearance
Case Study: The Sanctuary City for the Unborn That Voters Wouldn’t Build
In 2023 and 2024, Amarillo, TX’s City Council was the setting for a proposal that arrived fully developed, rather than being the result of local dialogue and deliberation. Council members heard from Mark Lee Dickson, an anti-abortion organizer based outside the city who has promoted similar measures across Texas, urging adoption of a “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” ordinance. The proposal followed a familiar template: it would have allowed individuals to sue anyone accused of aiding or abetting an abortion, including assistance related to travel for care obtained outside Texas. The ordinance defined “assistance” broadly, exposing people to liability for actions as minimal as giving directions or paying for gas.
Amarillo was already accustomed to serving as a stage for national abortion litigation. In 2023, a federal judge in the city ruled to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone nationwide, elevating Amarillo’s role in abortion politics far beyond its municipal governance. By the time the ordinance reached the November 2024 ballot, there was little reason to expect Amarillo would break from its pattern of conservative court rulings and support for Republican politicians that had passed stricter abortion laws.
Yet, it did. Amarillo voters rejected the ordinance by roughly a 20% margin, even as Donald Trump carried both Potter and Randall Counties, the two adjacent counties that together encompass Amarillo and its immediate suburbs, with more than 70% of the vote. The same electorate that voted for Donald Trump three separate times by a large margin rejected a local provision designed to enable private lawsuits against people accused of assisting with abortion-related travel.
That outcome — high partisan loyalty at the top of the ticket paired with rejection of a concrete local enforcement scheme — reflects a pattern organizers across rural and deep-red North Texas have been describing for years: in much of the region, politics is shaped less by ideological conversion than by disengagement, weak institutions, and the disappearance of everyday representation.
Step One: Stop Showing Up — Consistency is Key
The collapse of Democratic organization across rural and deep-red North Texas did not announce itself through a single defeat or ideological shift. It began to take shape in the late 1990s, after Ann Richards lost the governorship, and unfolded gradually in the years that followed, showing up quietly in the form of empty offices, unfilled roles and long stretches in which the Democratic party simply was not there.
In Randall County, that absence predated current leadership by years. Karmyn Seaberg, the county’s current Democratic chair, described taking over an organization that had already disappeared. “Randall County had not had a chair in numerous years,” she said. “At least three. There was no party activity whatsoever.” When she stepped into the role, she admitted, “I knew absolutely zero whenever I started it.” Still, she said, “I felt like an obligation” and “an overwhelming need to do something and to step up because I didn’t like the way the political climate was headed.” By the time she assumed the position, there were no standing structures to inherit — no active precinct system, no routine volunteer network and no consistent presence in local civic life.
In Armstrong County, the gap was even longer. Sonya Letson, the new Democratic chair for the county, said her position had gone unfilled for decades. “In our case it was 30 years,” she said. “No Democratic chair for 30 years.” The absence was not simply administrative; it had reshaped how local Democrats behaved. “What happened is all those Democrats [in Armstrong County] — which do exist — gravitated toward voting in the Republican primary because all their local races were Republican,” she explained. “When you try to search out and find your Democrats, you don’t know who they are.” Letson did not originally intend to rebuild the party. She said she had “fully planned to be completely retired” but, like Seaberg, became “unhappy with the direction of politics.” After the November 2024 general election, she recalled, “I said, I gotta do something, and so applied to become county chair”. Letson was subsequently appointed by the Texas State Democratic Party.
Party leaders across the region described the same basic conditions: long stretches without county chairs, precinct systems that had faded or vanished, party activity that surfaced briefly during election seasons before disappearing again. Over time, the difference between a weak organization and no organization at all became difficult to distinguish.
The consequences went beyond electoral outcomes. County chairs described losing the capacity to function as community-facing party leaders rather than merely existing as campaign placeholders during election years. Historically, those local roles had served as points of contact for residents navigating everyday concerns — schools, infrastructure, taxes, local governance. Without them, there was no consistent intermediary between voters and the party. People did not stop having concerns. Rather, they stopped knowing where they could go with those concerns.
Democratic county chairs across the Texas Panhandle stressed that this collapse came before the political environment now associated with North Texas. The region’s reputation as uniformly Republican hardened after the party’s local presence had already eroded. Competitive races became rarer only after organizations thinned. Volunteer recruitment became harder only after year-round engagement disappeared. In many counties, the party’s retreat preceded the patterns later cited as evidence that organizing there was futile.A brief history sits behind that retreat. For much of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party in Texas functioned as a locally-embedded civic institution. County chairs and precinct networks provided year-round representation, connecting voters to public life between elections. That structure weakened as partisan coalitions realigned in the mid-twentieth century, particularly after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act reshaped party affiliations and Republicans consolidated statewide power. But realignment alone does not explain the near-disappearance of Democratic infrastructure in many rural counties. Scarcity and incentives did. Limited funds and staff at the state and national party levels pushed investment toward metropolitan and competitive suburban districts, where returns were immediate and measurable. Over time, people began to treat rural counties as low-return environments, making absence easier to rationalize than reinvestment. The longer local organizations remained hollow, the harder they became to rebuild, and the more absence seemed normal.
Step Two: Teach Voters That Participation Doesn’t Matter
“We’re not as red as we think we are,” Seaberg said. “We have a non-voting problem.” She described residents who had not stopped paying attention, but who no longer believed their participation mattered. “They’re too tired, too beat down,” she said. “They don’t think that anybody’s listening to them.” In counties where the party had not maintained a year-round presence, disengagement became less a rejection of politics than a rational response to its absence.
Democratic retreat from local candidate recruitment reinforced that withdrawal. Sean Birkenfeld, chair of the Panhandle Democrats, said Democratic-leaning voters often continued to participate politically but not in ways that made them visible to their own party. “All their local races were Republican,” he explained. As a result, many voters “gravitated toward voting in the Republican primary” simply to have a voice in local offices that shaped their daily lives. The shift reflected electoral structure rather than partisan conversion, but it further obscured Democratic participation from view.
County chairs also pointed to state-level absence as a force multiplier. Several described attempts to escalate emerging local threats that went unanswered. During the fight over the “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” ordinance in Amarillo, one chair recalled trying repeatedly to involve then–state party chair Gilberto Hinojosa. “I tried to get Hinojosa up here,” she said. “I tried to get him to help us when we were fighting the sanctuary city ordinance.” According to the chair, the response never moved beyond assurances. “He would just give you lip service.” In organizational terms, that kind of non-response is not neutral: it teaches local leaders what the institution will and will not do, and it quietly narrows the scope of what they attempt to fight.
Hinojosa resigned as chair of the Texas State Democratic Party after Democrats underperformed across the state during the November 2024 general election. After Kendall Scudder’s election in March 2025 to serve the remainder of Hinojosa’s term, multiple county party chairs noted a shift. The change they emphasized was not an immediate flood of new resources, but physical presence and direct engagement. “He’s gone to almost every county,” said Chelsea Streeter, Chair of the Wichita County Democratic Party, noting that Scudder had already visited more than half of Texas’s 254 counties since he was elected. In Amarillo alone, multiple organizers noted that, “he’s been here four times in the last year and a half.” Another county chair contrasted the change bluntly. Under prior leadership, they received promises. Under Scudder, “he bought his ticket, drove up here and showed up.”
Scudder framed the shift as rejecting the idea that scarcity justified distance. “When the State Party doesn’t have resources, our county parties don’t have resources,” he said, noting that rural areas were often the first to lose funding. He also argued that disengagement was the predictable result of withdrawal. “When we don’t show up and we don’t support our locals that are doing their work on the ground,” Scudder said, “we should expect the results that we’ve been getting.”
County chairs described the effect in practical terms. “We finally feel like the party isn’t some distant thing in Austin,” Seaburg said. “We feel supported.” That sense of support mattered not because it changed voters’ beliefs overnight, but because it made participation legible again. Presence signaled that engagement might once more lead somewhere.
Photo by Jonathan Booker